Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety

"Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and rapable,
even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to protest
violence committed against one of our comrades. [...]
When we rely on appeals to innocence, we fore-
close a form of resistance that is outside
the limits of law, and instead
ally ourselves with the

State."

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‘Against Innocence - Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety” first
appeared in LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, Vol. i (2012).

Available online at liesjournal.info

Text layout: LIES;

Cover: I WE, May 2014.

ill-will-editions.tumblr.com

illwill@riseup.net

JACKIE WANG

AGAINST

INNOCENCE

RACE, GENDER, AND
THE POLITICS OF SAFETY

Saidiya V. Hartman: I think that gets at one of the fundamental
ethical questions/problems/crises for the West: the status of differ¬
ence and the status of the other. It’s as though in order to come to
any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated,
meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see
myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.”
That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every
day — the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a
racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to
be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to ...

Frank Wilderson: [laughter] A nigga on the warpath!

While I was reading the local newspaper I came across a story that
caught my attention. The article was about a 17 year-old boy from
Baltimore named Isaiah Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in
2007 when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining
him for hours. After he stopped responding they dumped his body in
the snow and did not call for medical assistance for over 40 minutes.
In late March 2012, the case was thrown out completely and none
of the counselors involved in his murder were charged with any¬
thing. The article I found online about the case was titled “Charges
Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.” By emphasizing
that it was a juvenile offender who died, the article is quick to flag
Isaiah as a criminal, as if to signal to readers that his death is not
worthy of sympathy or being taken up by civil rights activists. Every
comment left on the article was crude and contemptuous — the gen¬
eral sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society The news
about the case being thrown out barely registered at all. There was
no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of the many issues
bound up with the case — youth incarceration, racism, the privatiza¬
tion of prisons and jails (he died at a private facility), medical neglect,
state violence, and so forth — though to be fair, there was a critical
response when the case initially broke.

For weeks after reading the article I kept contemplating the ques¬
tion: What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons?
Which cases galvanize activists into action, and which are ignored
completely? In the wake of the Jena 6, Troy Davis, Oscar Grant,
Trayvon Martin, and other high profile cases, 1 I have taken note of

1 This article assumes some knowledge of race-related cases that received
substantial media attention in the last several years. For those who are un¬
familiar with the cases:

The Jena 6 were 6 Black teenagers convicted for beating a white student at
Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, on December 4, 2006, after mounting
racial tensions including the hanging of a noose on tree. 5 of the teens were
initially charged with attempted murder.

Troy Davis was a Black man who was executed on September 21, 2011 for
allegedly murdering police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia,
though there was little evidence to support the conviction.

JACKIE WANG

2

that can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify
white suffering (“slavery” being the favored analogy). Although we
must emphasize that Troy Davis did not kill police officer Mark
MacPhail, maybe we also should question why killing a cop is con¬
sidered morally deplorable when the cops, in the last few months
alone, have murdered 29 Black people. Talking about these murders
will not undo them. Having the “right line” cannot alter reality if
we do not put our bodies where our mouths are. As Spivak says, “it
can’t become our goal to keep watching our language.” 43 Rejecting
the politics of innocence is not about assuming a certain theoretical
posture or adopting a certain perspective — it is a lived position.

43 Spivak and Harasym, The Post-Colonial Critic.

27

AGAINST INNOCENCE

neither right, nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has
the power to legalize violence.” 42

The practice of isolating morally agreeable cases in order to high¬
light racist violence requires passively suffered Black death and
panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current para¬
digms of racism. While it may be factually true to state that Trayvon
Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous sense
of satisfaction. What if Trayvon Martin were armed? Maybe then
he could have defended himself by fighting back. But if the situa¬
tion had resulted in the death of George Zimmerman rather than of
Trayvon Martin, I doubt the public would have been as outraged and
galvanized into action to the same extent.

It is ridiculous to say that there will be justice for Trayvon when he is
already dead — no amount of prison time for Zimmerman can com¬
pensate. When we build politics around standards of legitimate vic-
timhood that requires passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that
requires a dead Black boy to make its point. It’s not surprising that
the nation or even the Black leadership have failed to rally behind
CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who was recently convicted
of second degree manslaughter after a group of racist, transphobic
white people attacked her and her friends, cutting CeCe’s cheek with
a glass bottle and provoking an altercation that led to the death of a
white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are
involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attack¬
ers are criminalized for their survival. When Akira Jackson, a Black
trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with
a baseball bat, she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter.

Cases that involve an “innocent” (passive), victimized Black person
also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify
and morally ennoble itself by taking a position against racism. We
need to challenge the status of certain raced and gendered subjects
as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies

42 Carmichael, Stokely Speaks.

JACKIE WANG

26

the patterns that structure political appeals, particularly the way
innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of
anti-racist political campaigns. These campaigns often center on
prosecuting and harshly punishing the individuals responsible for
overt and locatable acts of racist violence, thus positioning the State
and the criminal justice system as an ally andprotector of the oppressed.
If the “innocence” of a Black victim is not established, he or she will
not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause. If you are Black,
have a drug felony, and are attempting to file a complaint with the
ACLU regarding habitual police harassment — you are probably not
going to be legally represented by them or any other civil rights orga¬
nization anytime soon. * 2 An empathetic structure of feeling based on
appeals to innocence has come to ground contemporary anti-racist
politics. Within this framework, empathy can only be established
when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and
moral purity, which requires Black people, in the words of Frank
Wilderson, to be shaken free of “niggerization.” Social, political, cul¬
tural, and legal recognition only happens when a person is thoroughly
whitewashed, neutralized, and made non-threatening. The “spokes¬
person” model of doing activism (isolating specific exemplary cases)
also tends to emphasize the individual, rather than the collective
nature of the injury. Framing oppression in terms of individual actors
is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression
and diverts attention from the larger picture.

Oscar Grant was a Black man who was shot and killed by BART police
officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California on January 1, 2009.

Trayvon Martin was a 17 year-old Black youth who was murdered by
George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman, on February 26,
2012, in Sanford, Florida.

2 This was a real situation that I heard described by Michelle Alexander
when I saw her speak at Morgan State University. While she was working
as a civil rights lawyer at the ACLU, a young Black man brought a stack
of papers to her after hearing about their campaign against racial profiling.
The papers documented instances of police harassment in detail (including
names, dates, badges numbers, descriptions), but the ACLU refused to rep¬
resent him because he had a drug felony, even though he claimed that the
drugs were planted on him. Later, a scandal broke about the Oakland police,
particularly an officer he identified, planting drugs on POC.

3

AGAINST INNOCENCE

Using “innocence” as the foundation to address anti-Black violence
is an appeal to the white imaginary , though these arguments are cer¬
tainly made by people of color as well. Relying on this framework
re-entrenches a logic that criminalizes race and constructs subjects
as docile. A liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-
innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that
there is an a priori association of Blackness with guilt (criminality).
Perhaps association is too generous — there is a flat-out conflation
of the terms. As Frank Wilderson noted in “Gramsci’s Black Marx,”
the cop’s answer to the Black subject’s question — why did you shoot
me? — follows a tautology: “I shot you because you are Black; you
are Black because I shot you.” 3 In the words of Fanon, the cause
is the consequence. 4 Not only are Black men assumed guilty until
proven innocent, Blackness itself is considered synonymous with
guilt. Authentic victimhood, passivity, moral purity, and the adop¬
tion of a whitewashed position are necessary for recognition in the
eyes of the State. Wilderson, quoting N.W.A, notes that “a nigga on
the warpath” cannot be a proper subject of empathy. 5 The desire for
recognition compels us to be allies with, rather than enemies of the
State, to sacrifice ourselves in order to meet the standards of victim-
hood, to throw our bodies into traffic to prove that the car will hit us
rather than calling for the execution of all motorists. This is also the
logic of rape revenge narratives — only after a woman is thoroughly
degraded can we begin to tolerate her rage (but outside of films and
books, violent women are not tolerated even when they have the
“moral” grounds to fight back, as exemplified by the high rates of
women who are imprisoned or sentenced to death for murdering or
assaulting abusive partners).

We may fall back on such appeals for strategic reasons — to win a
case or to get the public on our side — but there is a problem when

3 Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil
Society?” Social Identities 9.2 (2003): 225-240.

4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Uniform Title: Damnes De La
Terre (New York: Grove Press, 1965).

5 Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Position of the
Unthought,” QuiParle 13.2 (2003): 183-201.

JACKIE WANG

4

not fit into a non-violent model of resistance. The tendency was to
construct a politics from the position of the disenfranchised white
middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy
movement from the “delinquent” or radical elements by condemn¬
ing property destruction, confrontations with cops, and — in cases
like Baltimore — anti-capitalist and anarchist analyses. When Amy
Goodman asked Maria Lewis from Occupy Oakland about the “vio¬
lent” protestors after the over 400 arrests made following an attempt
to occupy the vacant HenryJ. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland,
I was pleased that Maria affirmed rather than excised people’s anger:

AMY GOODMAN: Maria Lewis, what about some of the reports
that said that the protesters were violent?

MARIA LEWIS: Absolutely. There was a lot of anger this weekend,
and I think that the anger that the protesters showed in the streets this
weekend and the fighting back that did take place was reflective of a
larger anger in Oakland that is boiling over at the betrayal of the system.
I think that people, day by day, are realizing as the economy gets worse
and worse, as unemployment gets worse and worse, as homelessness gets
worse and worse, that the economic system, that capitalism in Oakland, is
failing us. And people are really angry about that, and they’re beginning
to fight back. And I think that that’s a really inspiring thing.

While the comment still frames the issue in terms of capitalist crisis,
the response skillfully rearticulates the terms of the discussion by a)
affirming the actions immediately, b) refusing to purify the move¬
ment by integrating rather than excluding the “violent” elements, c)
legitimizing the anger and desires of the protestors, d) shifting the
attention to the structural nature of the problem rather than get¬
ting hung up on making moral judgments about individual actors.
In other words, by rejecting a politics of innocence that reproduces
the “good,” compliant citizen. Stokely Carmichael put it well when
he said, “The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from
using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or
moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here
that violence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is

25

AGAINST INNOCENCE

)

longer ‘owns’ it and so no one can ‘steal’ it. However, the association
of women of color with sexual deviance bars them from possessing
this “valued” chastity. 41

AGAINST INNOCENCE

The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled
guilty or defined by the State as “criminals.” When we rely on ap¬
peals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside
the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the State. This ig¬
nores that the “enemies” in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror
are racially defined, that gender and class delimit who is worthy of
legal recognition. When the Occupy movement was in full swing in
the US, I often read countless articles and encountered participants
who were eager to police the politics and tactics of those who did

41 Early rape laws focused on the “property-like” aspects of women’s sexu¬
ality that liberal feminists are today attempting to reclaim. Liberal feminists
frame debates about women’s health, abortion, and rape around a notion
of female bodies as property. But using bodily self-ownership to make our
claims is counter-productive because certain bodies are more valued than
others. Liberal feminists also echo arguments for free markets when they
demand that the State not intervene in affairs relating to our private prop¬
erty (our bodies), because as owners we should be free to do what we want
with the things we own. In order to be owners of our bodies, we first have
to turn our bodies into property — into a commodity — which is a concep¬
tualization of our corporeality that makes our bodies subject to conquest
and appropriation in the first place. Pro-choice discourse that focuses on
the right for women to do what they want with their property substitutes a
choice-oriented strategy founded on liberal individualism for a collectivist,
liberationist one. (Loregrounding the question of choice in politics ignores
the forced sterilization of women color and the unequal access to medical
resources between middle class women and poor women.) While white men
make their claims for recognition as subjects , women and people of color are
required to make their claims as objects, as property (or if they are to make
their claims as subjects, they must translate themselves into a masculine
white discourse). In the US, juridical recognition was initially only extended
to white men and their property. These are the terms of recognition that op¬
erate today, which we must vehemently refuse. Liberal feminists try to write
themselves in by framing themselves as both the property and the owners.

JACKIE WANG

24

our strategies reinforce a framework in which revolutionary and in¬
surgent politics are unimaginable. I also want to argue that a politics
founded on appeals to innocence is anachronistic because it does not
address the transformation and re-organization of racist strategies
in the post-civil rights era. A politics of innocence is only capable
of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist
violence while obscuring the racism of a putatively color blind liber¬
alism that operates on a structural level. Posing the issue in terms of
personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual inten¬
tion, feeling or personal prejudice, though there is certain a psycho¬
logical and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the individual
in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. The
liberal color blind paradigm of racism submerges race beneath the
“commonsense” logic of crime and punishment. This effectively con¬
ceals racism, because it is not considered racist to be against crime.
Cases like the execution of Troy Davis, where the courts come under
scrutiny for racial bias, also legitimize state violence by treating such
cases as exceptional. The political response to the murder of Troy
Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to
clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the
claim that Davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an inno¬
cent Black man. Innocence, however, is just code for nonthreatening to
white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other Black men
— the bad ones — and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected
with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is the constituent
mechanism through which racial violence is carried out (wishful last-
minute appeals to the right to a fair trial reveal this — as if trials were
ever intended to be fair!). The State is imagined to be deviating from
its intended role as protector of the people, rather than being the
primary perpetrator. H. Rap Brown provides a sobering reminder
that, “Justice means ‘just-us-white-folks.’ There is no redress of
grievance for Blacks in this country” 6

6 H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, Die, Nigger, Die! :A Political Autobiography
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002).

5

AGAINST INNOCENCE

While there are countless examples of overt racism, Black social
(and physical) death is primarily achieved via a coded discourse of
“criminality” and a mediated forms of state violence carried out by
a impersonal carceral apparatus (the matrix of police, prisons, the
legal system, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation
officers, etc). In other words — incidents where a biased individual
fucks with or murders a person of color can be identified as racism
to “conscientious persons,” but the racism underlying the system¬
atic imprisonment of Black Americans under the pretense of the
War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains in¬
visible because it is spatially confined. When it is visible, it fails to
arouse public sympathy, even among the Black leadership. As Loi'c
Wacquant, scholar of the carceral state, asks, “What is the chance
that white Americans will identify with Black convicts when even
the Black leadership has turned its back on them?” 7 The abandon¬
ment of Black convicts by civil rights organizations is reflected in
the history of these organizations. From 1975-86, the NAACP and
the Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and
the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans was under¬
stood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons
from the civil rights organizations related imprisonment to the
general confinement of Black Americans. Imprisoned Black men
were, as Wacquant notes, portrayed inclusively as “brothers, uncles,
neighbors, friends.” 8 Between 1986-90 there was a dramatic shift in
the rhetoric and official policy of the NAACP and the Urban League
that is exemplary of the turn to a politics of innocence. By the early
1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison program and stopped
publishing articles about rehabilitation and post-imprisonment is¬
sues. Meanwhile these organizations began to embrace the rhetoric
of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance that en¬
couraged Blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their
neighborhoods, even going as far as endorsing harsher sentences for
minors and recidivists.

7 Lo'ic Wacquant, “Social Identity and the Ethics of Punishment,” Center
for Ethics in Society, Stanford University, 2007. Conference presentation.

8 Ibid.

JACKIE WANG

6

ingly, less likely to seek counseling and other support services.” 38
One reason why Black women may be less likely to report their rapes
is because seeking assistance from the police often backfires: poor
women of color who call the police during domestic disputes are
often sexually assaulted by police, criminalized themselves, or have
their children taken away Given that the infrastructure that exists
to support survivors (counseling, shelters, etc) often caters to white
women and neglects to reach out to poor communities of color, it’s
no surprise that women of color are less likely to utilize survivor
resources. But we should be careful when noting the widespread
neglect of the most vulnerable populations by police, the legal sys¬
tem, and social institutions — to assume that the primary problem
is “neglect” implies that these apparatuses are neutral, that their role
is to protect us, and that they are merely doing a bad job. On the
contrary, their purpose is to maintain the social order, protect white
people, and defend private property If these intuitions are violent
themselves, then expanding their jurisdiction will not help us, espe¬
cially while racism and patriarchy endures.

Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and
rapable, even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to
protest violence committed against one of our comrades. When we
challenge sexual violence with appeals to innocence, we set a trap
for ourselves by feeding into the assumption that white cis women’s
bodies are the only ones that cannot be violated because only white
femininity is sanctified. 39 As Kimberle Crenshaw writes, “The early
emphasis in rape law on the property-like aspect of women’s chastity
resulted in less solicitude for rape victims whose chastity had been
in some way devalued.” 40 Once she ‘gives away’ her chastity she no

38 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity
Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6
(1991): 1241-99.

39 Because the sexuality of white women derives its value from its ability to
differentiate itself from “deviant” sexuality, such as the sexuality of women
of color.

40 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.”

23

AGAINST INNOCENCE

ability is also simultaneously unrapability in that the rape of someone
who is not considered human does not register as rape. Only those consid¬
ered “human” can be raped. Rape is often conventionally defined 36
as “sexual intercourse” without “consent,” and consent requires the
participation of subjects in possession of full personhood. Those
considered not-human cannot give consent. Which is to say, there is no
recognized subject-position from which one can state their desires.
This is not to say that bodies constructed as rapable cannot express
consent or refusal to engage in sexual activity — but that their de¬
mands will be unintelligible because they are made from a position
outside of proper white femininity

Women of color are seen as sexually uninhibited by nature and thus
are unable to access the sexual purity at the core of white feminin¬
ity As Smith writes in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian
Genocide , Native American women are more likely to be raped than
any other group of women, yet the media and courts consistently
tend to only pay attention to rapes that involve the rape of a white
woman by a person of color. 37 Undocumented immigrant women
are vulnerable to sexual violence — not only by because they cannot
leave or report abusive partners because of the risk of deportation,
but also because police and border patrol officers routinely manipu¬
late their position of power over undocumented women by raping
and assaulting them, using the threat of deportation to get them to
submit and remain silent. A Mexican sociologist once told me that
women crossing the border often take contraceptives because the
rape of women crossing the border is so normalized. Black women
are also systematically ignored by the media and criminal justice sys¬
tem. According to Kimberle Crenshaw, “Black women are less likely
to report their rapes, less likely to have their cases come to trial, less
likely to have their trials result in convictions, and, most disturb-

36 New Oxford American Dictionary gives a peculiar definition: “the crime,
committed by a man, of forcing another person to have sexual intercourse
with him without their consent and against their will, esp. by the threat or
use of violence against them.” To what extent does this definition normalize
male violence by defining rape as inherently male?

37 Smith, Conquest.

JACKIE WANG

22

Black convicts, initially a part of the “we” articulated by civil
rights groups, became them. Wacquant writes, “This reticence [to
advocate for Black convicts] is further reinforced by the fact, noted
long ago by W.E.B. DuBois, that the tenuous position of the black
bourgeoisie in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability
to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethren: to offset the
symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans
must forcefully communicate to whites that they have ‘absolutely
no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who
has committed a crime.’” 9 When the Black leadership and middle-
class Blacks differentiate themselves from poorer Blacks, they feed
into a notion of Black exceptionalism that is used to dismantle anti¬
racist struggles. This class of exceptional Blacks (Barack Obama,
Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the collective delusion of
a post-race society

The shift in the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is
perhaps rooted in a fear of affirming the conflation of Blackness
and criminality by advocating for prisoners. However, not only have
these organizations abandoned Black prisoners — they shore up
and extend the Penal State by individualizing, depoliticizing, and
decontextualizing the issue of “crime and punishment” and vilifying
those most likely to be subjected to racialized state violence. The
dis-identification with poor, urban Black Americans is not limited
to Black men, but also Black women who are vilified via the figure of
the Welfare Queen: a lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society
(particularly hard-working white Americans). The Welfare State and
the Penal State complement one another, as Clinton’s 1998 state¬
ments denouncing prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or
social security reveal: he condemns former prisoners receiving wel¬
fare assistance for deviously committing “fraud and abuse” against
“working families” who “play by the rules.” 10 Furthermore, this com¬
plementarity is gendered. Black women are the shock absorbers of

9 Lo'ic Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and
Mesh,” Punishment If Society 3.1 (2001): 95-134.

10 Ibid.

7

AGAINST INNOCENCE

the social crisis created by the Penal State: the incarceration of Black
men profoundly increases the burden put on Black women, who are
force to perform more waged and unwaged (caring) labor, raise chil¬
dren alone, and are punished by the State when their husbands or
family members are convicted of crimes (for example, a family can¬
not receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been
convicted of a drug felony). The re-configuration of the Welfare
State under the Clinton Administration (which imposed stricter
regulations on welfare recipients) further intensified the backlash
against poor Black women. On this view, the Welfare State is the
apparatus used to regulate poor Black women who are not subjected
to regulation, directed chiefly at Black men, by the Penal State —
though it is important to note that the feminization of poverty
and the punitive turn in non-violent crime policy led to an 400%
increase in the female prison population between 1980 and the late
1990s. 11 Racialized patterns of incarceration and the assault on the
urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence because,
in the eyes of the public, convicts (along with their families and as¬
sociates) deserve such treatment. The politics of innocence directly
fosters this culture of vilification, even when it is used by civil rights
organizations.

WHITE SPACE

[CJrime porn often presents a view of prisons and urban ghettoes as “al¬
ternate universes” where the social order is drastically different, and the
links between social structures and the production of these environments
is conveniently ignored. In particular, although they are public institu¬
tions, prisons are removed from everyday US experience . I2

11 Cassandra Shaylor, “‘It’s Like Living in a Black Hole’: Women of Color
and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex,” New England
Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement 24.2 (1998).

12 Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners, “Fear and Loathing: Public
Feelings in Antiprison Work,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1: (2011) 270-290.

JACKIE WANG

8

them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence. The
precarious founding of the US required the disappearance of Native
American people, which was justified by associating the Native body
with filth. Andrea Smith wrote, “This ‘absence’ is effected through
the metaphorical transformation of native bodies into pollution of
which the colonial body must constantly purify itself.” 34 The violent
foundation of US freedom and white safety often goes unnoticed be¬
cause our lives are mediated in such a way that the violence is invis¬
ible or is considered legitimate and fails to register as violence (such
as the violence carried out by police and prisons). The connections
between our lives and the generalized atmosphere of violence is sub¬
merged in a complex web of institutions, structures, and economic
relations that legalize, normalize, legitimize, and — above all — are
constituted by this repetition of violence.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE

When we use innocence to select the proper subjects of empathetic
identification on which to base our politics, we simultaneously regu¬
late the ability for people to respond to other forms of violence, such
as rape and sexual assault. When a woman is raped, her sexual past is
inevitably used against her, and chastity is used to gauge the validity
of a woman’s claim. “Promiscuous” women, sex workers, women of
color, women experiencing homelessness, and addicts are not seen
as legitimate victims of rape — their moral character is always called
into question (they are always-already asking for it). In southern
California during the 1980s and 1990s, police officers would close
all reports of rape and violence made by sex workers, gang members,
and addicts by placing them in a file stamped “NHI”: No Human
Involved , 35 This police practice draws attention to the way that rap-

34 Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
(Cambridge: South End Press, 2005).

35 See Amy Scholder, Editor, Critical Condition: Women on the Edge of Violence,
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993) and Elizabeth Sisco, “NHI—No
Humans Involved,” paper delivered at the symposium “Critical Condition -
Women on the edge of violence,” San Francisco Cameraworks, 1993.

21

AGAINST INNOCENCE

their passivity and cleansing them of “the core of despair” crystal¬
lized in their bodies. 32

Another troublesome manifestation of the politics of safety is an
emphasis on personal comfort that supports police behavior in
consensus-based groups or spaces. For instance, when people at
Occupy Baltimore confronted sexual assaulters, I witnessed a gen¬
eral assembly become so bogged down by consensus procedure
that the only decision made about the assaulters in the space was
to stage a io minute presentation about safer spaces at the next GA.
No one in the group wanted to ban the assaulters from Occupy (as
Stokely Carmichael said, “The liberal is afraid to alienate anyone,
and therefore he is incapable of presenting any clear alternative.”) 33
Prioritizing personal comfort is unproductive, reformist, and can
bring the energy and momentum of bodies in motion to a standstill.
The politics of innocence and the politics of safety and comfort
are related in that both strategies reinforce passivity Comfort and
innocence produce each other when people base their demand for
comfort on the innocence of their location or subject-position.

The ethicality of our locations and identities (as people within the
US living under global capitalism) is an utter joke when you consider
that we live on stolen lands in a country built on slavery and genocide.
Even though I am a queer woman of color, my existence as a person
living in the US is built on violence. As a non-incarcerated person,
my “freedom” is only understood through the captivity of people like
my brother, who was sentenced to life behind bars at the age of 17.
When considering safety, we fail to ask critical questions about the
co-constitutive relationship between safety and violence. We need
to consider the extent to which racial violence is the unspoken and
necessary underside of security, particularly white security Safety re¬
quires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats.
White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjec¬
tion of bodies that they project hostile feelings onto, which allows

32 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

33 Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism
(New York: Random House, 1971).

JACKIE WANG

20

The spatial politics of safety organizes the urban landscape. Bodies
that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort
must be made disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure
a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space that white
people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor Black bodies
(as well as certain non-Black POC, trans people, homeless people,
differently-abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so these
bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. Prisons and
urban ghettoes prevent Black and brown bodies from contaminat¬
ing white space. Historically, appeals to the safety of women have
sanctioned the expansion of the police and prison regimes while
conjuring the racist image of the Black male rapist. With the rise of
the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s came an increase
in public awareness about sexual violence. Self-defense manuals and
classes, as well as Take Back the Night marches and rallies, rapidly
spread across the country The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public
campaigns targeted at women in urban areas warning of the dangers
of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad
declared that “(s]ingle women should avoid being alone in any part
of the city, at anytime.” 13 In The Rational Womans Guide to Self-Defense
(1975), women were told, “a little paranoia is really good for every
woman.” 14 At the same time that the State was asserting itself as the
protector of (white) women, the US saw the massive expansion of
prisons and the criminalization of Blackness. It could be argued that
the State and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of
the feminist movement and appropriated feminist rhetoric to es¬
tablish the racialized Penal State while simultaneously controlling
the movement of women (by promoting the idea that public space
was inherently threatening to women). People of this perspective
might hold that the media frenzy about the safety of women was a
backlash to the gains made by the feminist movement that sought
to discipline women and promote the idea that, as Georgina Hickey

13 Georgina Hickey, “From Civility to Self-Defense: Modern Advice to
Women on the Privileges and Dangers of Public Space,” WS£f Women’s
Studies Quarterly 39.1 (2011): 77-94.

14 Mary Conroy, The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (New York:
Grosset & Dunlap, 1975).

9

AGAINST INNOCENCE

wrote, “individual women were ultimately responsible for what hap¬
pened to them in public space.” 15 However, in In an Abusive State:
How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual
Violence , Kristin Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was
actually “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized soci¬
ety”: by insisting on “aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism,”
feminists assisted in the creation of a tough-on-crime model of po¬
licing and punishment. 16

Regardless of what perspective we agree with, the alignment of ra-
cialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning
women about the dangers of the lurking rapist was not a coincidence.
If the safety of women was a genuine concern, the campaigns would
not have been focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since
statistically it is more common for a woman to be raped by someone
she knows. Instead, women’s safety provided a convenient pretext
for the escalation of the Penal State, which was needed to regulate
and dispose of certain surplus populations (mostly poor Blacks) be¬
fore they became a threat to the US social order. For Wacquant, this
new regime of racialized social control became necessary after the
crisis of the urban ghetto (provoked by the massive loss of jobs and
resources attending deindustrialization) and the looming threat of
Black radical movements. 17 The torrent of uprisings that took place
in Black ghettoes between 1963-1968, particularly following the
murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, were followed by a wave of
prison upheavals (including Attica, Solidad, San Quentin, and facili¬
ties across Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Illinois, West Virginia,
and Pennsylvania). Of course, these upheavals were easier to contain
and shield from public view because they were cloaked and muffled
by the walls of the penitentiary

15 Hickey, “From Civility to Self-Defense.”

16 Kristin Bumiller, In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the
Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008).

17 Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis.”

JACKIE WANG

10

cion of articulated/explicit politics and collectivism, we flatten the
issues and miss an opportunity to ask critical questions about the
distribution of power, vulnerability, and violence, questions about
how and why certain people co-opt language and infrastructure that
is meant to respond to internally oppressive dynamics to perpetu¬
ate racial domination. As a Fanonian, I agree that removing all ele¬
ments of risk and danger reinforces a politics of reformism that just
reproduces the existing social order. Militancy is undermined by the
politics of safety It becomes impossible to do anything that involves
risk when people habitually block such actions on the grounds that
it makes them feel unsafe. People of color who use privilege theory
to argue that white people have the privilege to engage in risky ac¬
tions while POC cannot because they are the most vulnerable (most
likely to be targeted by the police, not have the resources to get out
of jail, etc) make a correct assessment of power differentials between
white and non-white political actors, but ultimately erase POC from
the history of militant struggle by falsely associating militancy with
whiteness and privilege. When an analysis of privilege is turned into
a political program that asserts that the most vulnerable should not
take risks, the only politically correct politics becomes a politics of
reformism and retreat, a politics that necessarily capitulates to the
status quo while erasing the legacy of Black Power groups like the
Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. For Fanon, it is pre¬
cisely the element of risk that makes militant action more urgent —
liberation can only be won by risking one’s life. Militancy is not just
tactically necessary — its dual objective is to transform people and
“fundamentally alter” their being by emboldening them, removing

grapple with issues like the discrimination of pregnant women in the work¬
place. She asserts that thinking through the lens of the individual cannot
resolve the exploitation of women’s caring labor because the individualized
nature of this form of labor is a barrier to undoing the burden placed on
women, who are the primary bearers of childcare responsibilities. She also
discusses how the transition from a feminism of liberation to a feminism of
choice makes it so that “any general social responsibility for motherhood, or
move towards the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities is immediately
blocked off.” Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender.”
Nina Power, One-Dimensional Woman. (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009).

19

AGAINST INNOCENCE

other forms of violence. Likewise, people can also mobilize their ex¬
periences with racism, transphobia, or classism to purify themselves.
When people identify with their victimization, we need to critically
consider whether it is being used as a tactical maneuver to construct
themselves as innocent and exert power without being questioned.
That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors — but
rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situa¬
tion closely, and being conscientious of the multiple power struggles
at play in different conflicts.

On the flip side of this is a radical queer critique that has recently
been leveled against the “safe space” model. In a statement from the
Copenhagen Queer Festival titled “No safer spaces this year,” festival
organizers wrote regarding their decision to remove the safer-space
guidelines of the festival, offering in its place an appeal to “individual
reflection and responsibility” (In other words, ‘The safe space is im¬
possible, therefore, fend for yourself.’) I see this rejection of collec¬
tive forms of organizing, and unwillingness to think beyond the in¬
dividual as the foundational political unit, as part of a historical shift
from queer liberation to queer performativity that coincides with
the advent of neoliberalism and the “Care of the Self’’-style “politics”
of choice). 31 By reacting against the failure of safe space with a suspi-

31 Post-leftists, perhaps responding to the way we are fragmented and at¬
omized under late-capitalism, also adamantly reject a collectivist model of
political mobilization. In “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,”
Maya Andrea Gonzalez advocates “inaugurating relations between indi¬
viduals defined in their singularity.” In “theses on the terrible community: 3.
AFFECTIVITY,” the idea that the human “community” is an aggregate of
monad-like singularities is further elaborated: “The terrible community is a
human agglomerate, not a group of comrades. The members of the terrible
community encounter each other and aggregate together by accident more
than by choice. They do not accompany one another, they do not know one an¬
other.” To what extent does the idea that the singularist (read, individualist)
or rhizomatic (non)-strategy is the only option reinforce liberal individual¬
ism? In The One Dimensional Woman , Nina Power discusses how individual
choice, flexibility, and freedom are used to atomize and pit workers against
each other. While acknowledging the current dynamics of waged labor, she
shows how using the “individual” as the primary political unit is unable to

JACKIE WANG

18

The engineering and management of urban space also demarcates
the limits of our political imagination by determining which narra¬
tives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction
of urban ghettoes and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them
as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places that are removed from
the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are
another example of a “void” zone that white people can only access
through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in
these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register
in the white imaginary In the instance that an “injustice” does reg¬
ister, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms.

When I think of the public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon
Martin, it seems significant that these murders took place in spaces
that the white imaginary has access to, which allows white people to
narrativize the incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Trayvon
was gunned down while visiting family in a gated neighborhood;
Oscar was murdered by a police officer in an Oakland commuter rail
station. These spaces are not “alternate universes” or void-zones that
lie outside white experience and comprehension. To what extent is
the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroach¬
ment of violence on spaces that white people occupy? What about
cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort zones?
When describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon
writes about “a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid
region,” where “Black is not a man.” 18 In the regions where Black is
not man, there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects
seen as worthy of having a story of their own.

TRANSLATION

When an instance of racist violence takes place on white turf, as in
the cases of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, there is still the prob¬
lem of translation. I contend that the politics of innocence renders
such violence comprehensible only if one is capable of seeing themselves

18 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).

11

AGAINST INNOCENCE

in that position. This framework often requires that a white narrative
(posed as the neutral, universal perspective) be grafted onto the in¬
cidents that conflict with this narrative. I was baffled when a call for
a protest march for Trayvon Martin made on the Occupy Baltimore
website said, “The case of Trayvon Martin - is symbolic of the war on
youth in general and the devaluing of young people everywhere.” I
doubt George Zimmerman was thinking, I gotta shoot that boy because
he’s young! No mention of race or anti-Blackness could be found in
the statement; race had been translated to youth , a condition that
white people can imaginatively access. At the march, speakers de¬
clared that the case of “Trayvon Martin is not a race issue — it’s a
99% issue!” As Saidiya Hartman has asserted in a conversation with
Frank Wilderson, “the other must be assimilated, meaning in this
case, utterly displaced and effaced.” 19

In late 2011, riots exploded across London and the UK after Mark
Duggan, a Black man, was murdered by the police. Many leftist and
liberals were unable to grapple with the unruly expression of rage
among largely poor and unemployed people of color, and refused to
support the passionate outburst they saw as disorderly and delin¬
quent. Even leftists fell into the trap of framing the State and proper¬
ty owners (including small business owners) as victims while criticiz¬
ing rioters for being politically incoherent and opportunistic. Slavoj
Zizek, for instance, responded by dismissing the riots as a “meaning¬
less outburst” in an article cynically titled “Shoplifters of the World
Unite.” Well-meaning leftists who felt obligated to affirm the riots
often did so by imposing a narrative of political consciousness and
coherence onto the amorphous eruption, sometimes recasting the
participants as “the proletariat” {an unemployedperson is just a worker
without a job, I was once told) or dissatisfied consumers whose acts
of theft and looting shed light on capitalist ideology. 20 These leftists

19 Hartman and Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought.”

20 Zygmunt Bauman described the rioters as “defective and disqualified
consumers.” Zizek wrote that “they were a manifestation of a consumerist
desire violently enacted when unable to realize itself in the ‘proper’ way -
by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in
the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to

JACKIE WANG

12

defend the police after an “occupier” called the cops on a homeless
man. When the police arrived to the encampment they were ver¬
bally confronted by a group of protesters. During the confrontation
the woman made an effort to protect the police by inserting herself
between the police and the protesters, telling those who were angry
about the cops that it was unjustified to exclude the police. In the
Baltimore City Paper she was quoted saying, “they were violating, I
thought, the cops’ space.”

The invocation of personal security and safety presses on our affec¬
tive and emotional registers and can thus be manipulated to justify
everything from racial profiling to war. 30 When people use safe space
language to call out people in activist spaces, the one wielding the
language is framed as innocent, and may even amplify or politicize
their presumed innocence. After the woman from Occupy Baltimore
came out as a survivor of violence and said she was traumatized by
being yelled at while defending the cops, I noticed that many people
became unwilling to take a critical stance on her blatantly pro-cop,
classist, and homeless-phobic actions and comments, which includ¬
ed statements like, “There are so many homeless drunks down there
— suffering from a nasty disease of addiction — what do I care if they
are there or not? I would rather see them in treatment — that is for
sure — but where they pass out is irrelevant to me.” Let it be known
that anyone who puts their body between the cops and my comrades to pro¬
tect the State’s monopoly on violence is a collaborator of the State. Surviving
gendered violence does not mean you are incapable of perpetuating

30 In “Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work,” Jessi Lee
Jackson and Erica R. Meiners offer the following definition of affect:
‘Affect is the body’s response to the world — amorphous, outside conscious
awareness, non-directional, undefined, full of possibility In this framing, af¬
fect is distinct from emotion, which is understood as the product of affect
being marshaled into personal expressions of feeling, as shaped by social
conventions.” Affect is useful to think of the way ‘the criminal’ and ‘the ter¬
rorist’ become linked to certain racialized bodies, and how people viscerally
respond to the presence of those bodies even when they consciously reject
racism. Jackson and Meiners, “Fear and Loathing.”

17

AGAINST INNOCENCE

to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capital¬
ism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the genera¬
tive subject that resolves late capital’s over-accumulation crisis, the
Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify
the basic categories that structure conflict within civil society: the
categories of work and exploitation.” 27 Historian Orlando Patterson
similarly insists on understanding slavery in terms of social death
rather than labor or exploitation. 28 Forced labor is undoubtedly a
part of the slave’s experience, but it is not what defines the slave rela¬
tion. Economic exploitation does not explain the phenomena of ra-
cialized incarceration; an analysis of capitalism that fails to address
anti-Blackness, or only addresses it as a by-product of capitalism, is
deficient.

SAFE SPACE

The discursive strategy of appealing to safety and innocence is also
enacted on a micro-level when white radicals manipulate “safe space”
language to maintain their power in political spaces. They do this
by silencing the criticisms of POC under the pretense that it makes
them feel “unsafe.” 29 This use of safe space language conflates dis¬
comfort and actual imminent danger — which is not to say that
white people are entitled to feel safe anyway. The phrase “I don’t feel
safe” is easy to manipulate because it frames the situation in terms of
the speaker’s personal feelings, making it difficult to respond critically
(even when the person is, say, being racist) because it will injure their
personal sense of security. Conversation often ends when people
politicize their feelings of discomfort by using safe space language.
The most ludicrous example of this that comes to mind was when a
woman from Occupy Baltimore manipulated feminist language to

27 Frank B. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,”
Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order 30.2 (2003): 18-28.

28 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

29 This tactic is also used to silence and delegitimize other people, such as
femmes who are too loud, or queers who engage in illegal actions.

JACKIE WANG

16

were quick to purge and re-articulate the anti-social and delinquent
elements of the riots rather than integrate them into their analysis,
insisting on figuring the rioter-subject as “a sovereign deliberate con¬
sciousness,” to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 21

Following the 1992 LA riots, 22 leftist commentators often opted to
define the event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight
the political nature of people’s actions. This attempt to reframe
the public discourse is borne of “good intentions” (the desire to
combat the conservative media’s portrayal of the riots as “pure
criminality”), but it also reflects the an impulse to contain, consoli¬
date, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political
models grounded in white, Euro-American traditions. When the
mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical, criminal,
and devoid of meaning, leftists often respond by describing them as
politically reasoned. Here, the confluence of political and anti-social
tendencies in a riot/rebellion are neither recognized nor embraced.
Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed
with sharp analyses of structural violence and explicitly political
messages — the rioters were obviously not politically or demo-
graphically homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to
privilege the voices of those who are educated and politically astute,
rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are
fucked and act without first seeking moral approval. Some leftists
and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive perspec¬
tives, like those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London who
said, “We’re not all gathering together for a cause, we’re running

consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly
- so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstra¬
tion of the material force of ideology - so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-
ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with
the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not
truly self-assertive.”

21 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Harasym Sarah, The Post-Colonial Critic:
Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990).

22 Riots erupted in LA on April 29,1992 after 3 white and 1 Hispanic LAPD
officers were acquitted for beating Rodney King, a Black man, following a
high-speed chase.

13

AGAINST INNOCENCE

down Foot Locker.” 23 Or the excitement of two girls stopped by the
BBC while drinking looted wine. When asked what they were doing,
they spoke of the giddy “madness” of it all, the “good fun” they were
having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that
“we can do what we want.” 24 Translating riots into morally palatable
terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence — rioters,
looters, criminals, thieves, and disruptors are not proper victims and
hence, not legitimate political actors. Morally ennobled victimiza¬
tion has become the necessary precondition for determining which
grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize.

With that being said, my reluctance to jam Black rage into a white
framework is not an assertion of the political viability of a pure
politics of refusal. White anarchists, ultra-leftists, post-Marxists, and
insurrectionists who adhere to and fetishize the position of being “for noth¬
ing and against everything” are equally eager to appropriate events like
the 2011 London riots for their (non) agenda. They insist on an analysis
focused on the crisis of capitalism, which downplays anti-Blackness
and ignores forms of gratuitous violence that cannot be attributed
solely to economic forces. Like liberals, post-left and anti-social
interpretive frameworks generate political narratives structured
by white assumptions, which delimits which questions are posed
which categories are the most analytically useful. Tiqqun explore
the ways in which we are enmeshed in power through our identities,
but tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an investment in
life (sometimes called “biopolitics”) rather than, as Achille Mbembe
writes, “the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who
must die” (sometimes called “necropolitics”). 25 This framework is

23 Zoe Williams, “The UK Riots: The Psychology of Looting,” The
Guardian, 2011.

24 “London Rioters: ‘Showing the Rich We Do What We Want,’” BBC
News, 2011 (Video).

25 Biopolitics and necropolitics are not mutually exclusive. While the
two forms of power coexist and constitute each other, necropolitics “regu¬
lates life through the perspective of death, therefore transforming life in
a mere existence bellow every life minimum” (Marina Grzinic). Writing
about Mbembe’s conceptualization of necropower, Grzinic notes that

14

JACKIE WANG

decidedly white, for it asserts that power is not enacted by direct
relations of force or violence, and that the capitalism reproduces
itself by inducing us to produces ourselves, to express our identities
through consumer choices, to base our politics on the affirmation of
our marginalized identities. This configuration of power as purely
generative and dispersed completely eclipses the realities of policing,
the militarization of the carceral system, the terrorization of people
of color, the institutional violence of the Welfare State and the Penal
State, and of Black and Native social death. While prisons certainly
“produce” race, a generative configuration of power that minimizes
direct relations of force can only be theorized from a white subject
position. Among ultra-left tendencies, communization theory nota¬
bly looks beyond the wage relation in its attempt to grasp the dy¬
namics of late-capitalism. Writing about Theorie Communiste (TC),
Maya Andrea Gonzalez notes that “TC focus on the reproduction of
the capital-labor relation, rather than on the production of value. This
change of focus allows them to bring within their purview the set
of relations that actually construct capitalist social life - beyond the
walls of the factory or office.” 26 However, while this reframing may
shed light on relations that constitute social life outside the work¬
place, it does not shed light on social death, for relations defined by
social death are not reducible to the capital-labor relation.

Rather than oppose class to race, Frank Wilderson draws our atten¬
tion to the difference between being exploited under capitalism (the
worker) and being marked as disposable or superfluous to capitalism
(the slave, the prisoner). He writes, “The absence of Black subjectiv¬
ity from the crux of radical discourse is symptomatic of [anl inability

necropower requires the “maximum destruction of persons and the cre¬
ation of deathscapes that are unique forms of social existence in which vast
populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the
status of living dead.” Though Mbembe focuses primarily on Africa, other
examples of these deathscapes may include prisons, New Orleans in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina, Palestine, and so forth.

26 Maya Andrea Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,”
Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary
Struggles (New York: Autonomedia, 2012).

AGAINST INNOCENCE